Open Source / GPL

Open source is happening on a cultural level, spreading roots past a genesis in software, and informing other areas. Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing blog has a great post discussing Eric Raymond’s seminal essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar which focussed on the contrasting approaches to building software — closed and open source.

Richard Stallman looks like either a prophet or an aging hippie, but you would never mistake him for a businessman. His long brown hair, scraggily beard and penchant for T-shirts and loose-fitting pants are in sharp contrast to the striped suits worn by nearly everyone else in the technology industry.

Open source has always been the underdog on the software scene, but it continues to draw intense interest from users and vendors alike in North America. Users want to avoid vendor lock-in and are attracted to potential cost savings. And vendors and value-added resellers see opportunities for innovation in the software market because of differences in the two markets, what works south of the border may not work here, at least in some respects, according to Michael O'Neil, managing director of Info-Tech Indaba.

One of the core problems for open source has always been that as a radical force outside the mainstream it is hard for its supporters to influence conventional players there. In part, this was what made Dell's Ideastorm so important: it gave a voice to those hitherto unable to communicate usefully with the company. The effects have been dramatic, with Dell now promising to sell systems with pre-installed GNU/Linux. The question then must be, how can we build on that success to achieve maximum impact?

The latest draft release of the GNU Public License version 3 (GPLv3) released last week includes provisions that aim specifically to stop future software patent deals like the one made by Microsoft and Novell last fall. The proposed language has caused controversy in the technical and legal realms of the open source community.